The Tuesday Inspiration: Most enjoyable and strangely addictive!

Bobby Moore's statue outside the stadium, watching over the fans as they arrive.

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Bobby Moore's statue outside the stadium, watching over the fans as they arrive.

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A 'we were here' shot just had to be taken to mark the occasion!

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A 'we were here' shot just had to be taken to mark the occasion!

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One of the pro-photographers setting up a remote control camera behind the goal. By the time the match started there were a dozen or more set up here, ready to catch the goals. The number of long lenses in use by the pros had to be seen to be believed including, I think, some copies of the new Canon 200-400mm lens which hasn't even been officially released yet!

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One of the pro-photographers setting up a remote control camera behind the goal. By the time the match started there were a dozen or more set up here, ready to catch the goals. The number of long lenses in use by the pros had to be seen to be believed including, I think, some copies of the new Canon 200-400mm lens which hasn't even been officially released yet!

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We arrived very early - the empty seats left us in no doubt as to where we were!

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We arrived very early - the empty seats left us in no doubt as to where we were!

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Time for the national anthems. The Mexican anthem certainly won the gold medal for being the most hummable - a very catchy little number!

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Time for the national anthems. The Mexican anthem certainly won the gold medal for being the most hummable - a very catchy little number!

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Goal! You can see the ball just about to cross the line as they Mexicans scored their first goal of the match.

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Goal! You can see the ball just about to cross the line as they Mexicans scored their first goal of the match.

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Time for a Mexican group hug to celebrate while the Japanese team hold a post mortem of what went wrong!

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Time for a Mexican group hug to celebrate while the Japanese team hold a post mortem of what went wrong!

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The whole of the UK has gone Olympics mad over the last ten days. I’m not generally a great watcher of sport on TV (with the exception of Formula 1) but even I have become obsessed by our ever increasing tally of gold medals since I’ve come home from summer school – it’s a real TI to see our sportsmen and women doing so fantastically well and very addictive too!

Today Kevin and I had our opportunity to see some of the action first hand when we went to Wembley Stadium for one of the men’s’ football semi-finals. We had hoped we might see Team GB but, as usual, they crashed and burned earlier in the competition so instead we saw a match between Mexico and Japan. This was my first ever football match and I don’t think I could have asked for a better first experience – the atmosphere was great (Wembley was almost full with a crowd of 82,372 people!) and it was a pretty exciting match. Mexico seemed to have the upper hand most of the time, even if Japan scored the first goal. Towards the end the Japanese players seemed to be particularly reluctant to even try for a goal and spent half their time kicking the ball in the wrong direction – even I (with my limited knowledge of the game) realised they needed to kick the ball towards the Mexican goal if they were to score!

Sadly the powers that be at Wembley were allowing no cameras with interchangeable lenses into the stadium so I couldn’t take my DSLR with me to capture the event. Instead I had to use my little Panasonic LX3 which has a maximum zoom of 60mm – hardly ideal for shooting footballers who are several hundred yards away. That wasn’t going to stop me trying to get some good shots though and at one point I lifted my camera to shoot as Mexico took a corner at our end of the pitch. I shot off one solitary frame and miraculously hit the shutter button at precisely the moment they scored their first goal - that made my day as well as theirs! The match finished with a 3-1 win for Mexico who now face a final against Brazil on Saturday – now that should be a very exciting match!

Thanks to Sandra for setting today’s theme. The other interpretations of this week’s theme can be found here.

The “Tuesday Inspiration” began in 2009 when Stéfan and I started setting each other a photographic challenge on a… Tuesday. Very soon afterwards, we decided to open this up to other PB members, followed by the idea that we should not reveal what the subject is, so that other members could compare how different members view a single theme. The Tuesday Inspiration is not a contest or a challenge, but a group of people all agreeing to post their interpretation of a single theme on Tuesdays. Each week, one of the contributors sets the theme. There are now over 40 members contributing to the TI. We have only two “rules”: don’t include the subject in the TI title or tags and please comply with standard PB guidelines on courtesy, etc. If you would like to take part, please send me a message via this blog.

Oh you are so lucky... we only got to see the Olympic park, no events, but that was still a whole heap of fun... last time I saw Wembley I was with 88 000 people at the U2 360 concert... We are also not sporty folk, but have found ourselves cheering on team GB and team RSA at any and every opportunity over the last 2 weeks... it's great isn't it!